Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

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The Harriet Jacobs Papers Project is designed as a lasting contribution to the ongoing study of the ways in which racism and slavery, and the struggle against racism and slavery, have shaped American culture and continue to shape American life.

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813. After both her mother, Delilah, and father, Elijah, died during Jacobs's youth, she and her younger brother, John, were raised by their maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Jacobs learned to read, write, and sew under her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow, and hoped to be freed by her. However, when Jacobs was eleven years old, her mistress died and willed her to Dr. James Norcom, a binding decision that initiated a lifetime of suffering and hardship for Jacobs. Dr. Norcom, represented later as Dr. Flint in Jacobs's narrative, sexually harassed and physically abused the teenaged Jacobs as long as she was a servant in his household. Jacobs warded off his advances by entering into an affair with a prominent white lawyer named Samuel Treadwell Sawyer and bearing him two children: Joseph (b. 1829) and Louisa Matilda (c. 1833-1913), who legally belonged to Norcom. Fearing Norcom's persistent sexual threats and hoping that he might relinquish his hold on her children, Jacobs hid herself in the storeroom crawlspace at her grandmother's house from 1835 until 1842. During those seven years Jacobs could do little more than sit up in the cramped space. She read, sewed, and watched over her children from a chink in the roof, waiting for an opportunity to escape to the North. Jacobs was finally able to make her way to New York City by boat in 1842 and was eventually reunited with her children there. Even in New York, however, Jacobs was at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which meant that wherever Jacobs lived in the United States, she could be reclaimed by the Norcoms and returned to slavery at any time. Around 1852, her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, purchased her freedom from the Norcoms. Jacobs's decision to write her autobiography stemmed from correspondence with her friend, Amy Post, a Quaker abolitionist and feminist activist. Jacobs had befriended Post in Rochester, New York in the late 1840s after she had moved there to join the abolitionist movement with her brother John. Jacobs confided her past to Post, who encouraged her to write it down herself after Harriet Beecher Stowe rejected Jacobs's request for an amanuensis. In 1861, with the aid of white abolitionist editor Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs published her narrative entitled pseudonymously as "Linda Brent." Jacobs's surviving correspondence with Child validates as entirely Jacobs's work, with only minor editing on Child's part. Despite her use of a pseudonym, Jacobs did gain fame for a time after its publication. She entered into public service with her daughter during the 1860s, aiding refugees during the Civil War and opening the Jacobs Free School in Alexandria, Virginia. After several trips south and one abroad to England, Jacobs reestablished herself as a relief worker in Washington, D.C. in the 1880s and died there on March 7, 1897. Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, (1861), is the most widely-read female antebellum slave narrative. In recounting her life experiences before she was freed, Jacobs offered her contemporary readers a startlingly realistic portrayal of her sexual history while a slave. Although several male authors of slave narratives had referred to the victimization of enslaved African American women by white men, none had addressed the subject as directly as Jacobs finally chose to. She not only documented the sexual abuse she suffered, but also explained how she had devised a way to use her sexuality as a means of avoiding exploitation by her master. Risking her reputation in the disclosure of such intimate details, Jacobs appealed to a northern female readership that might sympathize with the plight of a southern mother in bondage. Indeed, throughout her narrative, Jacobs focuses on the importance of family and motherhood. She details the strain of being separated from her grandmother and two children during her seven years in hiding, and afterwards in New York and Boston, when she lacked the means to free her daughter. As her biographer Jean Fagan Yellin has noted, Jacobs's slave narrative is similar to other narratives in its story of struggle, survival, and ultimately freedom. Yet she also reworks the male-centered slave narrative genre to accommodate issues of motherhood and sexuality. By confronting directly the cruel realities that plagued black women in the nineteenth century, Jacobs's work occupies a significant place in American literary tradition. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., , 2nd ed., New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Ann Jacobs, , eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs writes autobiographically about her families' and her personal struggles as a maturing "mullatto" child in the South.

Harriet Jacobs Essay - 297 Words - StudyMode

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813. After both her mother, Delilah, and father, Elijah, died during Jacobs's youth, she and her younger brother, John, were raised by their maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Jacobs learned to read, write, and sew under her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow, and hoped to be freed by her. However, when Jacobs was eleven years old, her mistress died and willed her to Dr. James Norcom, a binding decision that initiated a lifetime of suffering and hardship for Jacobs. Dr. Norcom, represented later as Dr. Flint in Jacobs's narrative, sexually harassed and physically abused the teenaged Jacobs as long as she was a servant in his household. Jacobs warded off his advances by entering into an affair with a prominent white lawyer named Samuel Treadwell Sawyer and bearing him two children: Joseph (b. 1829) and Louisa Matilda (c. 1833-1913), who legally belonged to Norcom. Fearing Norcom's persistent sexual threats and hoping that he might relinquish his hold on her children, Jacobs hid herself in the storeroom crawlspace at her grandmother's house from 1835 until 1842. During those seven years Jacobs could do little more than sit up in the cramped space. She read, sewed, and watched over her children from a chink in the roof, waiting for an opportunity to escape to the North. Jacobs was finally able to make her way to New York City by boat in 1842 and was eventually reunited with her children there. Even in New York, however, Jacobs was at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which meant that wherever Jacobs lived in the United States, she could be reclaimed by the Norcoms and returned to slavery at any time. Around 1852, her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, purchased her freedom from the Norcoms.

Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs essay - Case …

The experiences of slave women presented by Angela Davis and the theories of black women presented by Patricia Hill Collins are evident in the life of Harriet Jacobs and show the severity of slavery for black women.

Harriet Jacobs Essay Example | Topics and Well Written …

Harriet Jacobs used the character of Linda Brent to bring out the oppression of women as it was in the period of slavery (Gates, 102). As aforementioned, she wanted to reach out to the women in the North where slavery was illegal. In so doing, she would help enlighten the country on the effects of slavery on women and the family ties that accompany them. In her narrative, she says that men suffer from slavery, but women endure much more. By the time she was writing her narrative, she had two children born out of wedlock, after she was raped by her master. She focuses on an aspect of slavery, which many writers of that time felt uncomfortable mentioning. The sexual harassment of women slaves by their owners brought embarrassment both to the masters and their wives. With this regard, many women suffered in silence and their literary counterparts shied away from addressing the issue.

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Essay Harriet Jacobs Life of a Slave Girl - 1318 Words

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were both born into the slave era and thus became slaves. Their narratives were written after they had acquired freedom from slavery. Jacobs wrote published in 1861 while Douglass wrote . Both writers give details of their lives as slaves in the South; therefore, the narratives serve as their autobiographies. The narratives vary both in content and target audience because each writer experienced a different type of slavery. Despite this, they both manage to evoke the readers’ attention towards slavery, making them realize the urgent need for its abolition. This paper seeks to compare the different aspects of slavery as experienced by these writers when they were in bondage.

Harriet Jacobs, Slavery, The South, and the Civil War Essay

Norcom sexually harassed Harriet.Harriet was a writer who escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist speaker and reformer.Harriet Ann JacobsBoth were born into slavery.Both wrote about the accounts they went through while enslaved.Both writers have hatred of the harsh treatment slaves had to endure.Douglass’s views are expressed in "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," and Jacobs views in "Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl.

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Main IdeaEx. This essay will compare and contrast Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs.

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“ In addition to sexual harassment, Harriet Jacobs wrote about family ties. All the children born as a result of heinous acts of injustice were taken from their mothers at birth. In this case, this was not only to prevent bonding of parents and children but rather to help extricate the shame that might befall the slave owners. Additionally, the wives of slave owners were not particularly happy with having their husband’s illegitimate children around their homes. To Jacobs, women had to endure a lot of emotional pain in slavery. This she narrates with much conviction, having experienced it herself. Despite having high moral standards, she had them lowered to please her master who reasoned that since she was not treated brutally like her comrades, she owed him for this supposed advantage. ”

Harriet Jacobs and Olaudah Equiano Essay Examples

Gallery Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ..

Mary Rowlandson And Harriet Jacobs English Literature Essay

We have read the two texts "Ain't I a woman?" by Sojourner Truth and "Incidents in the life " by Harriet Jacobs in which both of them are slaves and how

Writing an unprecedented mixture of confession, self-justification, and societal expose, Harriet Jacobs turned her autobiography into a unique analysis of the myths and the realities that defined the situation of the African American woman and her relationship to nineteenth-century standards of womanhood. As a result, occupies a crucial place in the history of American women's literature in general and African American women's literature in particular. Published in the North, proved that until slavery was overthrown, only expatriate southern women writers, such as Jacobs and her contemporary, Angelina Grimke Weld, who left South Carolina to speak out against slavery in the South, could write freely about social problems in the South.